Friday, March 4, 2016

A
mother in Moshi, Tanzania, is hemorrhaging while doctors deliver her ashen-faced
infant. After failed attempts to stimulate the baby’s breathing, a midwife
instructs UNC Charlotte alum Gina Allen Wilson to wrap the newborn in a blanket
and set it aside.

“The
baby wasn’t crying; it wasn’t breathing. I and the other nurse and the midwife
were running around the room trying to intervene to figure out ways we could
help, and there were just very limited resources to intervene,” recalled Wilson,
a family nurse practitioner.

Gina Wilson helps newborns survive by teaching midwives.

For
her final clinical rotation to become a family nurse practitioner, she helped
deliver babies at a family clinic in Moshi at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro. “I
was on cloud nine delivering babies. Then (that) delivery went really, really
wrong. It was really bad,” Wilson said.

The
nursing staff could only provide an IV to hydrate the mother. The team was able
to stop the bleeding well enough for her to walk back to her village.

“That
experience haunted me … I just kept thinking how in America it’s so different.
If that happens, we have blood on hand … There’s a team of experts there to
help, and that baby would’ve gone to NICU,” said Wilson, referring to the Neonatal
Intensive Care Unit. She didn’t let go of those thoughts.

Wilson
earned her bachelor’s degree in nursing in 2010 while on a softball scholarship
at the University. She then began working in women’s health at Wake Forest
Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, N.C. “I loved nursing. When I finished
at UNC Charlotte, I really felt like I would never go back to school … I was,
and still am, so proud to be a nurse,” said Wilson, who grew up in Harrisburg,
N.C.

But
in working with patients, Wilson found pursuing advanced studies would be
beneficial to her career. With the goal of becoming a family nurse practitioner,
she enrolled in the Master of Nursing Program at Duke University in 2013.

“That’s
what led me to this,” Wilson explained about her work in the East African
country of Tanzania. “I was finishing my rotations, and I’d really enjoyed
pediatrics. I thought maybe I’d be a pediatric nurse practitioner. Then I had
an opportunity to go to Moshi, Tanzania, to do my one of my final clinical
residencies. This is where I had the experience that changed my life.”

High Infant
Mortality

Wilson
learned that a high percentage of babies born in Tanzania die from breathing
difficulties at birth, similar to what she experienced at the Moshi clinic. One
in every 38 deliveries is classified as a stillbirth in nearby Zanzibar,
Tanzania. “The traumatic birth I witnessed led me to start reviewing mortality rates,
causes of newborn deaths and efforts being done to reduce those,” Wilson said.

She
discovered that babies born in sub-Saharan Africa have a much higher neonatal
mortality rate compared to those in the United States. In Tanzania, it’s four
times higher. “I found a lot of these deaths are attributed to preventable
causes,” she explained. “For example, in America we have bulb-suction devices
to remove secretions from a baby’s nose and mouth after delivery. These simple
devices are scarce resources in Tanzania.”

She
met with a faculty member at Duke about her interest in reducing infant mortality
in Tanzania and decided to enter the nursing doctorate program. Her
dissertation is about the work.

She
became familiar with Helping Babies Breathe (HBB), a newborn resuscitation
program developed by the American Academy of Pediatrics. She took the training
with the goal of taking the program to nurse midwives in Tanzania and training
them so they could teach others. Previously, HBB had only been done with a
dozen or fewer health professionals who were not necessarily on the front lines
of deliveries as nurse midwives are.

Newly trained midwives are keeping more babies alive in Tanzania.

Wilson
had to obtain government approval for the program and raise $1,800 for supplies
before she began her effort. “Some people laughed at me — they said there was
no way I would get permission from the government,” she recalled, noting that
it took persistence and flexibility to accomplish.

To
raise money, she organized events, sent out letters and received substantial support
from the church she grew up in, Providence Baptist, which continues to provide
money for supplies. Wilson also partnered with ChaRA, a charitable organization
in Zanzibar. Together, they work to minimize neonatal mortality and stillborn
rates by educating midwives to be master trainers who can instruct other district
and village midwives in HBB techniques.

‘Power Not Really
Reliable’

Funds
purchase Penguin Suction Devices (bulb suctions); bag-mask resuscitators that can
be disassembled, cleaned and reused; NeoNatalies, which are babies filled with
water used in training simulations; Swahili workbooks; and solar lights. “Power
is not really reliable anywhere in the country,” said Wilson, who has made
three trips to Tanzania.

After
the first one, as part of her master’s program, she returned to teach a Zanzibar
class of six master trainers, who have since educated 27 additional midwives on
HBB procedures. On her third trip, last September, she followed up with the HBB
trainees and did more instruction. She plans to finish her doctorate in May and
return again in September 2016.

Wilson
hopes the Tanzanian islands of Zanzibar, Unguja and Pemba will eventually get the
program.

She
still thinks about the important role UNC Charlotte has played in her career
and the rest of her life. Not only was Wilson a pitcher on the softball team,
she met her husband, Ryan Wilson, at UNC Charlotte, where he was a golfer and
now works with the nonprofit First Tee. They married in 2011 and live in Jacksonville
Beach, Fla., where Gina is a family nurse practitioner at a pediatric clinic.

Furthermore,
her dad, Bill Allen, works at the University in the Information Technology
Services Department, and her mother, Mary Allen, retired from UNC Charlotte’s
Materials Management Department. Her siblings, two sisters, also have Niner
connections. Shauna Allen Drye worked at UNC Charlotte at one time, and Kelly
Allen Clark currently is a doctoral student in special education.

“I
think UNC Charlotte is the foundation for my work in Africa,” Wilson noted. “UNC
Charlotte taught me how to be a nurse, and the importance of doing this work. I
knew I wanted to help people when I came to Charlotte, and nursing was the
perfect fit — to be the hands and feet that love and care for people.”

To
learn more about her work, see Helping Babies Breathe or Hope Project: Helping
Babies Breathe in Africa, both on Facebook.

Leanna Pough, '16,
is a communications coordinator in the Office of Public Relations.

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